Author: slush 2014-04-23 18:01:57
Published on: 2014-04-23T18:01:57+00:00
In an email conversation, Pieter Wuille and Marek argued about the best way to store BIP32 seed and its compatibility with altcoins. Pieter suggested that storing the seed is better than storing the master node because it is smaller, but Marek disagreed as it limits serialization and deserialization flexibility that a BIP32 node has. Marek considers the BIP32 seed as an internal transitional state and should not be handled by end-users. On the other hand, a well-serialized BIP32 node can be used widely and has no downsides in contrast to using raw BIP32 seed.Pieter mentioned that BIP32 is a Bitcoin improvement proposal and does not necessarily apply to other coins, although they can adopt it. However, Marek thinks that it is essential to think about altcoins since people want them, and there is no reason to break compatibility between Bitcoin and other altcoins. He expressed his preference for another sentence instead of "Bitcoin seed," but he does not care much about it since it is only a magic string for hashing the raw seed.Finally, Pieter expressed his concern about removing the ability to use the magic in serialization to prevent importing a chain from the wrong coin. Still, Marek pointed out that even existing software handling BIP32 does not care about the version at all. For Marek, the only useful feature of the version is the "xpub/xprv" distinction, which indicates if it stores public or private information. Thus, using prefixes that do not enforce anything is even more dangerous because it creates false expectations that only dogecoin is stored.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T16:17:01.092416+00:00